Quote

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

Alice Mattison

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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Order
Stories
Undeserving
Character
Badness
Give
Innocent
Giving
Characters
Make
Trouble
Story
Poor

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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
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I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
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I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
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Little children are all writers.
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We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.
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Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.
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There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
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I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
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I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
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In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
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If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
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